Architecting An Agile Enterprise Network

Originally published in ficolo.com in 2020.

Ficolo offers Megaport’s Network-as-a-Service solution, which provides data center interconnectivity to hundreds of locations around the globe, in addition to leading cloud providers.  It allows you to build a scalable IT backbone.

With the emergence of cloud services, whether public or private, a new way of thinking has spread beyond development teams to operations and business areas. They now expect more speed, agility and even experimentational capability. In many enterprises, connectivity, while understood to be a vital part of delivering services, is an area struggling to evolve along with flexible delivery models. The classic way of ordering services with long commitment times and fixed bandwidth can create obstacles for building business momentum.

Sometimes overlooked, network architecture is a key component for improved service performance. When architecting the enterprise network, the goal should be to work smarter, faster, and easier to help alignment with the changing business needs. At the same time, the network needs to enable both cloud service access and global reach. Basic internet connectivity would go part of the way, but lacks in providing security, reliability and visibility.

Traditional connectivity methods usually require separately ordering connections from one or more network operators. This is a lengthy process typically taking weeks if not months. If you need to use multiple service providers and redundancy, management can become a pain. And what you get is a connection of predefined properties that may not scale and where changes could require a new lengthy order process.

As the requirements for connectivity solutions change alongside business needs, a more adaptable approach is in order.

Megaport offers a great alternative to traditional operators

To address this challenge, Ficolo offers Megaport’s Network-as-a-Service solution, which provides data center interconnectivity to hundreds of locations around the globe, in addition to leading cloud providers.  It allows you to build a scalable IT backbone.

Here’s how it works:

Suppose you have offices in four geographies: Finland, Asia, North America and Australia. All you need in each location is connectivity to a Megaport-enabled data center, such as Ficolo in Finland.
At each data center you will need a port.
Between each port you can set up connectivity to any of the other locations. You can do this in seconds.
When you need to increase or decrease bandwidth, all you do is reconfigure.

Megaport speeds up your business by letting you quickly introduce services – and the connectivity they need – and equally right-size when the demand changes.

Megaport’s Software Defined Networking (SDN) solution has the broadest footprint of any on offer, with excellent flexibility and speed. Compared to traditional operators, Megaport connectivity is inherently redundant, easy to use, and fast to provision.

Thanks to flexible terms and a global reach, you can be sure that your network is agile enough to meet your changing business needs. Megaport provides the robust network architecture to help you on your path to growth.